You’d think it would be easy to come up with a list of bad technologies from the past couple of decades. But we had a hard time agreeing: What makes a “bad” technology? After all, technologies can be bad because they fail …Continue reading
Understanding Pakistan’s cybersecurity woes
It may not be unreasonable to say that Pakistanis do not trust banks. According to a study carried out by Standard Chartered Bank and independent research agency GlobeScan in 2017, 50 percent of emerging affluent Pakistanis prefer to save cash at home …Continue reading
Rise of the robots
Gone are the days when Lego was considered child’s play. The building blocks that you played with in your youth have given way to a new breed of advanced programmable robots. Each version of this Lego building block system contains a few …Continue reading
Starting them off early
Excited chatter fills the air as more than 25 children pour into the room at Olomopolo Media theater. A team of volunteers seats the children in groups around small tables. The first agenda of the day is to create soap bubbles. Soon …Continue reading
The billion tree solution
The word tsunami means devastation elsewhere in the world. But in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhunkhwa province, people are associating it with a flood of green. The provincial government has fought back climate change and deforestation by planting millions of saplings. The project is officially …Continue reading
The perils of drinking water
Safe drinking water is a basic human right. Goal six of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) states that universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water should be provided for all by the year 2030. However, in …Continue reading
Mixed signals – recent research in Pakistan’s mountain ranges
Although it is located on the far western side of the Hindukush-Karakoram-Himalaya (HKH) massif, Pakistan lies still at its center. It’s the only country with a share in all three mountain ranges and it lies at the bank of the Indus, a …Continue reading
The Emerging Healthtech Landscape
Sattar Khan suffered chronic pain in his legs for seven years. He consulted several doctors in his hometown of Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan, who told him he needed a hip joint surgery but the facility was not available anywhere in …Continue reading
Pakistani researchers get patents for nano-antibiotics
Antibiotics are not always as effective as expected in treating bacterial infections. Conventional drug therapy shows that a range of factors affect their performance. These include irregular distribution of the drug in the body, low permeability of tissues, elevated hydrophobicity of biologically …Continue reading
Harnessing the Power of Business to Tackle Energy Poverty
Thousands of villages across Pakistan still lack access to piped gas and electricity supplied from the national grid. Based on government’s statistics, around three fourth of the households across the country are estimated to have no access to piped gas and about 30 …Continue reading